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Friday, December 9, 2016

Indiana University-Purdue
University Indianapolis (IUPUI) provides its incoming freshman students with
the First Year Seminar Program (FYS). FYS is designed to help transition
students into college level responsibilities, familiarize students with the campus,
educate them on resources available and introduce them to their desired field
of study if they have selected one.

Back in August, University
College decided to pilot CN Post in some FYS and Bridge courses for the fall
2016 semester. Ten instructors signed up and have been using CN Post within
their courses for the entire semester. The semester is now coming to a close,
so today, we were able to gather feedback from the instructors in the Teaching
Scholar’s Think Tank (TST) meeting.

TST Meeting

The faculty members
were first asked to share their experience using CN Post and tools they have
used and found helpful. Most all of the courses used posting. Instructors
shared that most of their students enjoyed communicating with their peers in
the academic social networking environment CN provides. Diana Sims-Harris told
CN she really liked using the hashtag feature; she created hashtags at the
beginning of the semester to serve as discussion topics that her students could
use to label their posts. A few of these included #AskMentor, #ScienceNews,
#CareersinScience, etc. These hashtags helped guide her student’s posts, helped
them filter each other’s posts and even introduced them to campus resources
with her predefinted #CampusResources hashtag.

First Year Seminar Philanthropy
instructor, Pamela Clark, also utilized hashtags along with many other features
on CN Post. She had her students download the CN mobile app and they
photographed and interviewed people on the IUPUI campus and then shared it with
their peers while using the hashtag #HumansofIUPUI. This activity helped first year
students familiarize themselves with the IUPUI community. Pamela even used the
global class feature to connect her course with her colleagues’ courses so
their students could share and connect with other students outside of their own
class.

Other instructors, like Michelle
Quirke, decided to put their own spin on CN Post. Michelle awarded her students
badges and even created her own badge titled “Quirke’s Quality Questions” or
the Q badge. She had her students create thoughtful sample exam questions
derived from their reading assignments with the poll tool and encouraged them
to not only answer each other’s questions but to rate them as well. She would
consider the quality and ratings of each poll and choose a winner to award the Q
badge to. The winner’s question would even appear on the actual exam. So,
students hunted for this Q badge to see who received it and what the question
is. This inspired her students to read their assignments, create good
questions, think critically, answer sample questions, evaluate their peers’
questions and learn through a fun activity.

At the TST meeting, FYS
instructors were also asked if they had any suggestions for CN Post. Tim Scully
expressed how helpful it would be to create rubrics for Anar Seeds so he could
gain a better idea of the participation work load he is assigning and so his
students could gain a better understanding of what is expected of them. Dennis Rudnick
suggested that aside from posting job opportunities CN should provide students
with information about graduate programs and research opportunities based on
their profile. This would make CN a stronger, academic network and help engage
students further into the platform and get students thinking about their
interests and what those may look like in the future.

CourseNetworking and the IUPUI CyberLab conducted a student survey in these FYS courses from November to December. 125 students responded the survey. The survey results were shared with instructors on this TST meeting. The image below displays the answers on a few highlighted questions.

At the end of the meeting an
exciting drawing also took place. The FYS instructors were encouraged to
nominate their students for the best CN portfolio award. Ten students completed
all the key sections of their portfolio and received the “Best Portfolio”
badge. The top five were entered into a drawing for cash price from
CourseNetworking. At the meeting the winners were drawn. The three winners
drawn were Taylor Hobbs (https://www.thecn.com/TH574),
Justice Pacheco (https://www.thecn.com/JP311)
and Hannah Oliver (https://www.thecn.com/HO52)
and an honorable mention was awarded to Gordon Shao (https://www.thecn.com/GS139).

Taylor Hobbs Justice Pacheco Hannah Oliver Gordon Shao

The CN pilot program and the meeting
were full of learning opportunities and a number of the instructors expressed
that they would be using CN next semester to explore more tools and deliver
more engaging learning activities to students.